Hi all,

Been a silent reader on PMZilla for a few months now. I passed my PMP exam this morning with 5Ps on my first try, and wanted to briefly share my experience with everyone.

Reading Materials used:
PM Prepcast
Rita's Book (one time)
PMBOK V4 (twice, one read, one skim)

I started studying lightly in January 2013, when I bought the PM Prepcast to fulfill the 35 contact hours. From January to April I listened to the modules every day, taking notes in a Word document (sadly, I never reviewed this document later as it was about 100 pages long). In mid-April I started reading Rita's, taking another set of Word document notes, which I reviewed later before the test. In mid-May I started reading the PMBOK guide and took another set of notes, which I reviewed later. Starting July I did as many practice exams I could find. The results are as below:

Test Results

I also reviewed tons of Lessons Learned on this forum which were a great resource, and found Rajesh's notes particularily helpful. For the test, I memorized page 43, and the EV calculations for the brain dump, but didn't really refer to it much.

The Test

The test wasn't that difficult, on par with some of the practice tests I've taken. I went through the 200 questions in about 2.5 hours, marking about 60 of them. There were many questions about closing, one big diagram about critical path float (zero), about 10 EV calculations which were simple, about 20 T&T questions which weren't that difficult. I used the remaining 1.5 hours to review the 60 questions, and finished the exam with 3 mins to go. I knew the white screen was coming and was pretty confident, but still the heart raced! It said congrats, and i was shocked i got 5Ps!

Good luck to all the future aspirants using PMBOK 5! I am glad I finished this before the changeover!